Book Image

Flash with Drupal

Book Image

Flash with Drupal

Overview of this book

Due to its power and expandability, Drupal has become one of the most popular open source content management systems. At the same time, Flash has been adopted for its ability to create beautiful and dynamic web applications. By combining these technologies, you can create Flash applications that are both visually stunning and rich in content. This book is an in depth discussion and tutorial on how to integrate Flash applications with Drupal CMS. It will describe the best techniques and practices for integrating Flash technology with the power and flexibility of Drupal by building real-life Flash applications. Within this book, you will learn how to build Flash applications that show text from within Drupal and also present images, music, and video within a single Flash application. You will also be able to take advantage of the expandable fields and content filtering provided from the CCK and Views modules to add flexibility and power to your Flash applications. Finally, you will learn how to add your own custom functionality to Drupal and then utilize that from within your Flash applications leaving you with a world of possibilities. This book starts out with a simple introduction to Flash and Drupal technology where you will create a simple Flash application and then embed that within Drupal. From there, each subsequent chapter builds on the previous chapters tackling a new and challenging task. For each new task, you will take a step-by-step approach to building a real-life application that utilizes the feature introduced within that chapter. You will also explore alternative design approaches that will eliminate the current design challenges that developers face when building Flash-driven Drupal sites; and all this while staying true to the Object Oriented Principles that govern the foundation of the ActionScript 3 language. By the end of this book, you will be able to apply all the lessons learned from this book to any other use case you may encounter.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Flash with Drupal
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Working with audio in Drupal


Integrating audio in Drupal is surprisingly easy, thanks to the contribution of the Audio module. This module allows you to upload audio tracks to your Drupal website (typically in MP3 format), by creating an Audio node. It also comes with a very basic audio player that will play those audio tracks in the node that was created. To start, let's download and enable the Audio module along with the Token, Views, and getID3 modules, which are required for the Audio module. The modules that you will need to download and install are as follows:

Note

At the time of writing this book, the Audio module was still considered "unstable". Because of this, I would recommend downloading the development version until a stable release has been made. It is also recommended to use the development or "unstable" versions...